Friday, July 15, 2016

How to Easily Add Gamification Techniques to Your Content

Humans love games.

You love games. I love games.

Games are fun: they’re engaging and mentally stimulating. Our fondness for games is hardwired into our brains.

Want proof that we love games?

As of 2015, the iTunes App Store had over 396,000 gaming apps, which had almost doubled since July of 2013. People are downloading games. Chances are, you have a game or two on your smartphone right now. Maybe you even played it today. (I know I did.)

What is gamification?

“the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the user’s impulses which revolve around the idea of status and achievement.”

Although gamification could be considered to be another catchy buzzword, the concept isn’t exactly new.

However, it didn’t really catch on until 2010. That’s when it gained traction from Gartner’s prediction that more and more companies would begin gamifying processes to better appeal to consumers and increase customer retention.

You may not believe in auras, and you may despise the Papyrus font, but aren’t you still a little intrigued about the color of your aura?

Some of the most popular quizzes come from BuzzFeed. No surprise there.

What might surprise you, however, is how appealing such quizzes actually are to people.

You may be busy, stressed, and have a ton of things on your schedule for today. But a quiz about something as inane as serving sizes is somehow compelling. You want to play.

Why? Because there is a subtle challenge to your smartness. You want to prove—whether to yourself or to others—that you’re darn good at knowing serving sizes.

So, you take the quiz.

BuzzFeed wins. They’ve successfully persuaded you to spend four minutes doing something on their site.

The Telegraph is also an expert at producing compelling quizzes:

If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to use a site like ProProfs to make a quiz. It only takes a few minutes, and the results are huge.

Badges

People also like to be rewarded for their efforts.

I remember when I was in elementary school, my teacher would give me a star sticker as a positive reinforcement for doing something well.

Whenever I amassed five stars, I would get a reward.

Giving audiences virtual badges has become a popular way to reward people for the time and energy they invest.

These badges tend to make people feel legitimized, and users can show them off to their friends.

If you were trying to encourage readers to comment on your blog posts, you could give readers certain badges for the number of comments they left or for the length of time they contributed to a discussion.

Many websites have implemented badges as a form of verifying celebrity status. Quora, for example, gives you a blue checkmark on your profile pic if you’re someone famous.

You can gain similar status on some sites simply by being active, being helpful, and being respected.

Search Engine Journal, a content-based site, applies gamification to the way it ranks its contributor base.

Authors who contribute frequently with top-rated content are recognized with a “VIP contributor” badge on their profiles.

Leveling

This is similar to badges because it exploits people’s desire to achieve a certain status.

But rather than using digital icons as rewards, you assign your customers, readers, etc. different levels according to their level of involvement.

Maybe there are 10 different levels—10 being the highest. This could definitely motivate someone to participate and to become a more involved member of your online community.

Credit Karma uses a variety of gamification techniques. They use the leveling feature on several of their interactive pages:

Challenges

Who doesn’t love a good challenge?

Testing ourselves pushes us to grow, progress, and become better versions of ourselves.

You could challenge consumers to post pictures on Instagram showing unconventional ways of using your product.

Or maybe at the end of a blog post, you create a scenario and ask your readers a question to see what they would do in a difficult situation.

Many people will be compelled to take you up on a challenge, and you’re likely to see a significant increase in engagement.

Moz used a gamification challenge feature to help users decide which tool they needed for a specific SEO issue.

By clicking the checkbox of the issue they are interested in, users can get an instant display of the tool they should look into.

Health challenges are a popular gamification feature. Some health challenges allow users to track their progress and customize their settings.

Progress bar

Perhaps one of the most straightforward gamification techniques is to simply display a progress bar as a person completes a form or reviews a product/service.

This shows people what percentage of the process they’ve completed as they move from step to step.

For instance, if they’ve filled out two of five pages, the progress bar would say “40% done.”

People hate to leave things incomplete, so the desire to complete a process can serve as motivation to follow through to the end.

You can use progress bars almost anywhere. As long as the user is focused on completing a task, there’s room for a progress bar.